Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“What’s that?” Merlin said.

“Oh, shit.”

I had a good idea what this was, though I’d never seen one before. Everyone entering the vault had to reconfirm credentials by punching in a verification code.

Or else what?

I wasn’t sure.

“It might be the same as the code that opened the door,” I said. “Do you remember what it was?”

Merlin unfolded his list of numbers. “Yes. Two nine three five.”

I spun around and pressed the four numbers. But the beeping continued, a red diode flashing.

“That’s not it,” I said. “Shit.”

“What’s this, a secondary alarm?”

“Of some sort, yeah. Auto-activated at night, probably.” I tried the standard defaults, 1111 and 9999 and 1234, but nothing halted the beeping.

Behind the mask, sweat trickled down my face. It was hot, and damp, and uncomfortable.

“You want to try?” I said.

“Sure, but I’ll just be guessing, too.”

“Meanwhile I’ll go through the files.”

I stepped aside and made room for Merlin. He began punching digits in no discernible order, faster and faster.

The beeping continued implacably.

I scrutinized the line of file cabinets. There were twelve of them, four drawers in each, and they were arranged alphabetically. The first drawer was labeled “A — Am.” I wasn’t sure where exactly I should be looking. “S” for Slander Sheet? For the Slade Group? I moved down the row of cabinets, found the drawer labeled “Sh-Sy,” pulled it open.

The files were marked with plastic tabs, names like Schuster Institute and Symons, Kendrick.

And there it was: Slade Group. I pulled out the brown folder, my chest tight. I opened it and found correspondence between Ashton Norcross and a woman named Ellen Wiley, of Upperville, Virginia. Ellen Wiley, whose name sounded vaguely familiar.

The beeping stopped abruptly.

“You get it?” I said, turning around.

Merlin shrugged, said, “No. It just suddenly—”

A metal ka-chunk sound.

“What the hell?” Merlin cried.

“Sounds like a relocking system. Spring-loaded locking bolts. Open the door — now .”

He went right away to the door and turned the lever. But the door wouldn’t open.

“What the hell?” Merlin said.

“I was afraid of that.” The relocking system, I knew, was designed to block the door from opening. The sort of feature you might find in some safe rooms or survivalist shelters. In fact, I was pretty sure the strong room was actually a prefab, standalone safe room.

“We’re locked in,” he said.

I nodded.

“There’s always an internal vault door release.”

“Depends on how it’s designed. Not necessarily.”

He tried the door lever once again. “Shit. Well, screw this.” He slammed a fist against the steel door, which did nothing but hurt his fist. He groaned and turned away. I moved in and examined the doorframe, noticed the silicon gasket. I took out a pocketknife, flicked the blade, and ran it along the gap between door and frame. It was tight. Every foot or so the blade hit something solid, which I assumed were the relocking bolts. I didn’t see a way out.

Then I smelled smoke.

I sniffed, looked around, saw Merlin lighting a piece of paper, which he’d apparently grabbed from a file drawer. The paper went up in flames, sending up a plume of smoke.

“What the hell are you doing—?” I shouted as a loud klaxon began to sound.

“Check it out.” He pointed with his free hand at the ceiling, at what looked like a smoke detector. Arrayed around the ceiling, every eight feet or so, were sprinkler heads, only they were hissing gas, not sprinkling water.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“That’s going to automatically trigger the unlocking mechanism on the door,” Merlin said with a crooked smile.

The sheet of paper floated away in a black wisp and danced through the air, the smoke now thick enough to sting my eyes.

“You goddamned idiot!” I said. “That’s halon gas!” A label on the wall to the left of the door warned:

“They don’t use halon anymore!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes they do.” Some years ago it was determined that halon damaged the ozone layer, and it was banned. But existing systems were allowed to remain in place. They were grandfathered in. It was still considered a superior alternative to water-sprinkler systems, especially in archives and places where water could damage paper records. Nothing as effective had taken its place.

Halon was not only bad for the environment, it was bad for humans. At high concentrations — in other words, in a few minutes, when enough halon had hissed out of the ceiling-mounted nozzles — it could cause permanent nerve damage and then death.

And we were trapped in here.

The fire suppression system didn’t unlock the doors. The relocking mechanism on the doors had been triggered by our failure to disarm the secondary security system.

Merlin was coughing, and then I began to cough as well. I was furious at him for setting off the halon system, for doing something so impulsive without even checking with me. But even more, I was beginning to feel icy tendrils of panic seep into my bowels.

Because I did not see a way out.

Despite the deafening clang of the alarm, despite the hissing of the halon gas, despite my growing sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped in this steel-reinforced coffin, I forced myself to focus. To think.

It wasn’t easy. I was steadily growing more and more woozy from breathing the halon, and I couldn’t stop coughing. My body was desperately craving oxygen.

What Merlin had done wasn’t, in fact, stupid. Setting off the fire alarm should have triggered the automatic unlocking of the vault doors. That’s how it should have been, and probably what the fire code required.

But this setup privileged security over safety. Our failure to enter the right code in the secondary panel meant we were locked in, whether that was against the fire code or not.

When I was a teenager living in the town of Malden, north of Boston, my friends and I used to hang out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, a used-car dealership owned by one of my buddies’ fathers. There I learned, from a repo man, how to pick locks. I also learned the rudiments of electrical wiring, the stuff engineers learn in school. And I knew that the secondary alarm panel had to be connected to some kind of relay switch that triggered the relocking bolts. It didn’t take me long to find what had to be the relay. It was a white-painted metal box about four inches square, mounted to the wall next to the door. Unobtrusive. Easy to miss. These relays always have an electromagnet inside, and the magnet either closes a switch or opens it. And that, right or wrong, was about the sum total of what I knew about relay switches.

Connected to the relay was white-painted electrical conduit about half an inch wide, which ran along the doorframe, then straight up to the ceiling. That had to be the power supply.

I handed Merlin the brown folder so I had both hands free. “Let me have your magnet,” I said.

Merlin, no surprise, seemed to get why I wanted it. I’m sure he knew a hell of a lot more about mechanical engineering than I did. “You think—?”

He handed me the oblong chunk of rare-earth magnet. Neodymium, he’d said. It was extremely strong, but was it strong enough? I took it and knelt down. I pulled open the metal box and saw, as I suspected, a copper coil inside. The guts of the electromagnet. Then I placed the neodymium magnet on the exterior of the box and waited.